Preface

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to, the practices they purport to describe. The effect is to deny that those
they write about are self-monitoring agents, instruments and patients, who
reflect critically on (the circumstances of) their own and others’ actions.
The result is to make understanding something which ethnographers do,
unreciprocably, to others. Understanding then ceases to be a mutual
struggle of beings in the world and becomes objectivized knowledge with a
spray-on humanist finish. I argue my case for Bali, but as should be
evident, the argument applies more broadly. What indeed is rather
frightening is that the time debate has involved a number of the best – or at
least the most celebrated – anthropologists of their time.
The problem of narrative
As my concern is representations of the past, before I turning to the
issue of time in Bali, it is necessary to consider the issue of historical
writing. The reason is that it has been the subject of much recent argument
among literary critical specialists, people on the border of philosophy and
history, and others. So great are the claims made, fashionably, on behalf of
narrative that it is necessary to review what is involved in some detail. Bits
of debris from the argument have even landed in the quiet backwater of
anthropology in such guises as the reflexive critique of ethnographic
writing which stressed the centrality of literary and narrative forms in
Western representations of others (e.g. Boon 1982; Clifford and Marcus
1986; Geertz 1988). Indeed Boon has come delightfully close to summing
up the whole – or what he regards as the important bits – of Balinese
culture in terms of narrative genres. Narrative has been more generally
mooted as fundamental to time, history and indeed human experience of the
world itself. Balinese themselves also use on many occasions what one
might be tempted to call narratives, from popular stories, to babad, to the
Mahabharata and Ramayana, as available examples (conto) or analogies
(pra(tiw)imba) by which to evaluate the significance of actions and events,
and their likely outcome. So, if we are to reflect critically on foreign
commentators’ or Balinese representations of the past, should we not begin
by considering how far, and in what way, problems of history resolve
themselves into issues of cultural differences of narrative style? In short, to
what degree are debates about Indonesian and Malay ideas about the past
(e.g. Soedjatmoko 1965; Errington 1979; Vickers 1990; cf. Sweeney 1987)
actually about different conventions of writing and telling stories?
To clear one matter out of the way, recognition of the diversity of
narrative genres would seem a useful corrective to two forms of
anthropological philistinism. One is to treat cultures simply as abstracted